With the rapid expansion of the COps team, not every query is answered by a Customer Service Ninja anymore, being told stuff that just isn’t true seems to be happening more often which is a shame. I got told I could add four weekly payments in the iOS app, but it’s not true (yet).

Today I went to a different PayPoint location, and this time it worked perfectly

The shopkeeper swiped it in what looked to my untrained eyes to be the same as my unsuccessful attempt yesterday, and I got the notification immediately, and 10 mins later the desposit fully updated in the app.

I don’t know why this PayPoint location was any different from the last when it looked like they did the same thing

Who knows, maybe . The Monzo advice seems to be that it should work at all PayPoint locations though, so not sure if an older machine should make a difference? It’s seems like a possible explanation though.

It’s one of the side effects of onboarding a lot of people very quickly unfortunately One of the other side effects is old hands (like myself) now infrequently talk to customers on the Frontline as we have other responsibilities.

It’s definitely no one’s intention to give inaccurate information and I’m really sorry if that has been the case. Conversations are both formally QA’d as well as our culture of direct feedback where anybody in the company feels able to pass on thoughts to anybody else. In COps that generally means if someone picking it up down the line, or on an escalation, notices something we could have done better, they’ll pass that on directly to the previous COp

I got my Monzo card today in the morning, in the afternoon i went to 2 Paypoint close to my home, (one local store and one Post Office) the first one told me, “you can’t do that here, we don’t do that”. The second one told me “sure, we do, please insert your card in the reader”, i told him that he needs to swipe the card, He replies me “sorry, we don’t have a swipe reader”.

Like a couple of others, the shopkeeper tried using the chip first which failed. I prompted them to swipe it and then it was ok.

But the shopkeeper then saw some preset deposit values (up to £100) on his terminal screen and concluded that the maximum value allowed per transaction was £100. So, without asking, he processed my £300 as 3 separate transactions - charging me 3x £1 transaction fees (Customer support duly then refunded £2 though)

This was at BP Service Station, Black Brook Park Avenue, Taunton.

All in all - very happy the service is available though. Well worth the £1!

The whole thing sounds pretty abysmal - for customers who are less technical it’s confusing. Plus there’s a charge for it. The person who was charged 3x £1 because it was processed as 3 transactions, it’s just madness.

Sometimes you have to shift the bar of what you expect in terms of customer experience if you want things to go your way.

I put 6 figures worth of transactions through Paypoint per year through a myriad of services it offers. I have trained myself on how to do them on many variants of Paypoints systems because the majority of staff working in shops simply don’t know. I don’t mind doing this because the services Paypoint offer are very, very beneficial to me.

Human beings have varied levels of autonomy and intuition. Some people like to play with things to find out how they work or use trial and error until they get it right. Others cannot do that and either need to be trained by someone they trust, or will find some way to refuse to do it. If you get someone like that, try again another time when someone else is on.

Paypoint is a wondrous, if user unfriendly system that offers thousands of services that shop assistants will never have heard of. They do have a dedicated helpline which retailers are encouraged to use if they are stuck. But many shop assistants won’t use it, they don’t have time.

To the person who said Paypoint transactions alone make the shop money, or 50p or whatever, this isn’t the case. Paypoint pays the retailer a fixed percentage of each transaction which is capped at 7p. Paypoint’s selling point to retailers is it draws custom to the store which then increases sales of profitable groceries. This is a contentious point and shop owners can be found complaining online about the poor commission rate that barely, if at all covers the troublesome phone connection it requires and adds to queueing times. Some suggest offering Paypoint actually costs them money and it becomes clearer why many can’t be asked with doing any but the most common transactions they recognise.

For Monzo to overcome these issues, it might be necessary to do more than implore Paypoint to train retailers. Staff turnover and attrition at retailers isn’t exactly the lowest of all industries and there being some 28,000 shops, sending out briefs to cover one of the many services offered might work, or it might be futile. There seems to be quite a uniquely enthusiastic army of customers behind the brand (myself included) and maybe going down the road of encouraging us to help retailers by explaining how to swipe the card through the terminal or other card swipe module to activate the top up screen is the way forward.